Analyzing My First $100 from Google AdSense

I signed up for Google AdSense on April 4, 2008. It took several weeks to sort it out and to slowly integrate the ads into The Daleisphere and my two professional blogs. After some initial testing, I had them implemented by early June 2008.

Round about March 3, 2009 I cleared my first $100 in AdSense revenue! Whoo hoo! That’s $100 in 10 short months – roughly 30 cents per day.

No Text or RSS Ads at First

My biggest mistake, it seems, was to decide not to use the text-based Google Ads – like the ad you can now see at the top of this post (just under the Categories and Tags). I think blogs littered with AdSense text-ads look hideous. I wanted my ads to be presented tastefully. Hence, for the first 10 months I opted for image-only ads.

Note: My sites only became eligible for RSS Feedburner ads in January 2009. So no significant revenue came in from that source.

Basic Structure of Ads

As demonstrated in the image below, for most of those ten months, I had each of my sites set up such that there were three primary image-based ad types (channels, in AdSense parlance) embedded within any given post:

• tower ads (120 x 600 down the right column);
• cube ads (250 x 250 in the middle column); and
• footer ads (468 x 60 under a post – before the comments).

Google AdSense allows you to categorize your ads into ‘channels’ so you can see exactly how much revenue was generated from each channel. In the report below, you can see exactly how much was earned from each ‘channel’/image-ad placement, per site:

When I aggregate the totals for the three ad/channel types across my three sites, the results are as follows:

As you can see, the cube ads were the most lucrative, representing 51% of all ad revenue. These three ad-types generated 86% of the revenue. The other 14% was made from 11ish other ad types that I experimented with (mostly in the first couple months).

You can also see from the chart above that Google AdSense only pays when a user clicks on an ad (it seems that 1 ad click generates about 16 cents – so, please, click away! ).

The results:

• Of the 327,383 ads served up from my sites during that period, I was paid for just 656 clicks.
• I earned 16.5 cents per click;
• I earned $1 per 3,274 ads served
• I earned one penny per 33 ads served
• 11 page views were needed to generate 1 penny (assuming 3 ads per page)
• on average, my sites need to serve 166 pages to generate one ad click
• 1,100 page views were needed to generate $1.00
• I earned 53 cents per post (I wrote 187 posts during that period)

At this rate it would take:

• 109,000 page views per month (10 x current rate) to earn $100 per month
• 1,090,000 page views per month (100 x current) to earn $1,000 per month
• 10,900,000 page views per month (1,000 x) to earn $10,000 a month.

It seems I have my work cut out for me if I want to make a living at this!

Moving Forward

After discussing these dismal results with Dave Zatz, he suggested I abandon my text-free ad purity and run at least one text-based ad per page. The result – the text ad you see in this post above and after the first post on the home page. Since I can place only three AdSense ads on a page, I replaced the prior AdSense footer ad with an Amazon.com ad.

It’s been 7 weeks since I made that change. As of April 21, 2009 my sites generated $50 in revenue in those 7 weeks – that’s roughly a 600% week-to-week increase!

Some of that, no doubt, has to do with my slowly increasing uniques and page views. In the early days I was excited when I topped 100 page-views in a day. I’m now averaging about 1,000 page views a day. Whatever the reason, the text-based AdSense ads are clearly better revenue earners than image-based ads alone. So, I’ll be keep at least one of them per post going forward. 

[April 22, 2009 Update: Taking a quick look at my AdSense reports on April 22, I notice two significant details: 

1. Tower Ad Comeback: My tower ad revenue has increased substantially since March 3 and is about equal with the text-based ad revenue I’m getting.
2. Higher Text-ad per-Click Revenue?: The per-click revenue generated from text ads is substantially higher than for image-based ads. It took only 170 clicks since March 3 to earn $50 compared to the 656 clicks needed to earn my first $100 when I used only image-based ads. Perhaps I’m not getting a higher click-through from my text ads (as I had expected). Rather, it could be that the per-click pay-out is higher for text ads].

I’ll report back when my second $100 is earned. At the current rate, my second $100 should be earned by the end of June 2009.

Note Re: Amazon Link/Ad Revenue

You’ll also see a few Amazon ads around my site too. They pay out only when a reader both: (i) clicks through the ad; and (ii) buys a product from Amazon. I generated approximately $50 from those ads and in-post links over the first year. Probably 50% of my Amazon revenue comes from my iPhone App development text book recommendations in my ‘iPhone App Development – Where to Start’ post